While the Saskatchewan Health Authority is continuing the rollout of AIMS or the Administrative Information Management System, employees with the SHA are still voicing their concerns with the new software intended to streamline several systems in use throughout the province.
The biggest issue that cropped up was an issue with pay, something that staff noticed immediately as some employees were short by upwards of $1,000 or more on their paychecks.
“My pay was wrong for all of the callbacks, and most of my coworkers who did callbacks, theirs were wrong as well,” explained Samantha Dixon. She is a medical lab technologist at the Weyburn General Hospital. “It was supposed to be corrected on the second pay period; it wasn’t.”
Dixon noted she now appears to have been paid properly for what has been missed, but sometimes figuring that out can be difficult.
“The pay slips are hard to parse through what you’ve been paid for, and what you haven’t in terms of calls when they’ve been screwed up, so it’s time-consuming to figure out if you’ve been paid properly.”
Management on the ground has been good in helping to deal with the issues, Dixon said. She highlighted her manager who made sure the proper paperwork was initially submitted. Now, however, the process has the staff having to go back into the AIMS system to note the pay has been processed incorrectly.
The SHA did state everyone who was missing pay has had that amount paid out to the employees, but Dixon said that isn’t always the case.
“They had said that the second pay period with AIMS, everything would be corrected – it was not,” Dixon stated. “I can’t say that it’s correct even now. I am lucky enough that I just didn’t take calls for the next two pay periods, so I could actually track easier whether I was paid properly, but I don’t know that it’s been fixed for all of my co-workers.”
In a written response to a request for an interview last month, the SHA’s Chief Human Resources Officer, Michael Northcott, stated the system did have an error rate of less than one percent for all of the employees, something that was in line with what the older system encountered. That response, however, irritates Dixon.
“I mean, if it was $20 missing, fine, but it’s hundreds of dollars – in some cases it’s over $1000 – and one percent is not acceptable, and their lack of concern about that is irritating,” Dixon told Discover Weyburn. “I don’t feel valued as an employee. It makes it tough to want to work for an organization when you don’t feel valued.”
Dixon added the whole situation is putting the onus on the employees to make sure they are being paid properly.